Letter from the Editor

I recently watched a TED talk, by a gentleman from Guatemala named Luis Von Ahn. I can't say I was looking for it, but the ever-intrusive social media algorithms had their way with me and up popped a 12-minute video on YouTube. 

Have you heard of Luis? Yeah- me either. It took around 3 minutes to make me realise who this person was; only because he explicitly shared his identity on the video.

Luis’s story was a story of growing up with nothing, a hard-working mother scraping some money together so that their son Luis could get an education. He attended College in the United States, achieved a PHD in computer science and worked with an associate to explore how he could make a difference in the world of the next young person facing a similar journey to education that he did.

Funnily enough, his talk was about the idea of education compared to social media and video games, or as he expressed it: The idea of having a plate of broccoli next to the most delicious dessert you could imagine and then asking young people what they’d prefer to eat.  This struck a chord with me. Here I was, at the front of my class, rattling on about the intricacies of consumer law and the impact on business planning; how exciting the exploration of an article from the ACCC investigation into the Supermarket Duopoly in Australia and the impact on consumers back pocket this was causing. Unfortunately, all they could see was a plate of vegetables. Meanwhile, that chocolate lava cake was keeping their legs warm as their phone sat in their pockets. 

I did think about this a bit further though and in fact I’ve come to the realisation that I am, in fact, dabbling in the desert idea with my students. Take for example my Year 7 Maths class. Don’t tell them, but I’m sneakily upskilling their times tables by playing a quiz game with them. They get so competitive, so excited and the sense of achievement that you can see as they climb up the leaderboard is electrifying. I also won’t tell them that the specific quiz game I play had a big luck element in it – allowing any student who gets a question right to potentially swap their score with anyone else in the class and that the leaderboard is relatively arbitrary- it is just who gets lucky at the right time. I think they know to be honest. I just think that sometimes they can’t believe how they’ve conned their teacher into letting them play a 10 minute game in Maths class. 

So many teachers around our College do such amazing things with their classes. We wake in the middle of the night with that stroke of genius that maybe, just maybe might spice up that plate of broccoli for an upcoming Science or English class. Maybe we’re not making a dessert, but we’re making the broccoli as enticing as possible as we know the benefit of a balanced meal, and know the impact later on in life that eating plenty of vegetables can have on young people.

So this is my shoutout to my fellow Chefs- preparing and serving education day in day out, before the students inevitably return to the dessert of distraction.

Oh and by the way, Luis was the inventor of Duolingo. You might have heard of that one.

Jack Lynch

Editor